Featured Project: The Village Farm

Four students worked with The Village Farm, a cooperative farm in Ashland. The student team toured The Village Farm and learned how it is serving as a model site for sustainable agriculture, practice and education. Since the farm is fairly new, the student team decided to create a testimony board. The team painted a 4 feet by 8 feet plywood board with a farming scene. There are blank spaces on the board where people can explain through testimony why local, organic, and cooperative farming practices are important to them. The board will be housed at the farm, but will also travel to the growers market and to other sites in the Rogue Valley.

Featured Project: “Fragile. Handle with Care. Recycle.”

Three students teamed up with Madrona Arts – a local organization whose goal is to raise ecological awareness through the arts – to create a project titled, “Fragile. Handle with Care. Recycle”. Their goal was to bring more awareness to recycling bins by decorating them. “Every day people dump trash into recycling bins by mistake,” says one of the students working on this project. “It can really be a problem when it comes to sorting the recycling properly.” The student team and its community partner paired up for countless hours of cleaning, priming, and painting metal trash cans.

Each recycling bin was painted with a unique design such as Andy Warhol soup cans, hand prints, or a rotating earth. The words “Fragile. Handle with Care. Recycle.” were a consistent addition to each bin and an appropriate title for the theme.

What is the purpose of this Blog

I established this blog to document the “Activist Art Projects” that have been and continue to be created by the students who take my course. I may occasionally provide links to other artists and activists in the field who are committed to community engagement. I also hope to provide a space for my students to share future projects as they continue to employ themselves in community engagement beyond their college years.

Introduction

In 2006 I created a course titled Activist Art. This course explores and defines activism and the roles artists play in instigating change and igniting community involvement. Along with examining significant historical and current trends in activist art through assigned readings, lectures, and in-class discussions, students are also required to create an “Activist Art Project”. As a Community Based Learning (CBL) course, Activist Art integrates course content with relevant community engagement. In this course, students team up with a “community partner” (community agency) and explore successful strategies and approaches to activist art in relation to the agency’s mission. These meetings culminate into a unique “activist” or “community” based project which bridges the gap between Southern Oregon University students and the citizens of the Rogue Valley.